Artists: Lana Čmajčanin and Adela Jušić, Milena Michalski, Mladen Miljanović, Paul Coldwell, Sabina Tanović i Dario Kristić, Vladimir Miladinović, Ziyah Gafić

Curated by Paul Lowe and Elma Hasimbegović

Since the early 1990s, billions of dollars have been poured into post-conflict settings to try to help war-torn and divided societies overcome the legacies of violence and authoritarian rule. Particular attention has been directed at projects that facilitate ‘reconciliation’ however there remains little understanding of what reconciliation is or how it can be achieved. If anything, what has been learnt from experiments in post-conflict peacebuilding is that attempts to ‘reconcile’ or ‘draw a line’ under the past have as much chance of solidifying and antagonising a sense of difference than in producing the conditions for enduring peace. What, then, is reconciliation? How can it be achieved? And how might we know when a reconciliation process has been successful? Is it even something that can or should be pursued?

Art&Reconciliation is a new multi-disciplinary research initiative, funded by the AHRC, which brings together King’s College London, UAL and LSE in order to explore these issues.   It is particularly interested in exploring the relationship between art and reconciliation. This is, in part, because art is increasingly seen as a ‘go to’ peacebuilding tool, which has the potential to overcome many of the problems that more ‘traditional’ responses to violence face. This, however, also remains an idea rooted in faith, which lacks sufficient evidence.  This project will explore the relationship between the arts and reconciliation, exploring how the arts may (or may not) contribute to facilitating reconciliation through commissions and research with artists working in post conflict settings.  We want to ask how might the arts challenge what it is that is imagined as ‘reconciliation’?

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